#cities (8 links)
- 15min-City whatif.sonycsl.it
The 15 min City platform lets you explore how much worldwide cities are close to this ideal, by merging open data about venues within cities, population grids and routing algorithms. With 15 min City, you can check which activities or places are accessible to a neighbourhood on foot and by bike, and compare it to other urban areas. You can also check which city is the closest to the 15 minutes ideal looking at our city rankings in the map.
- The strange world of urban exploration - Robert Macfarlane theguardian.com
<blockquote>Urbex is not for everyone. Let me put that differently: urbex is hardly for anyone. Participation is high in profile but small in number (perhaps 20,000 globally), and the thrills are niche. Not for urbexers the sturm und drang of mountains or the arid elegance of desert exploration. Their epiphanies are mucky, their metaphysics mephitic. The short-term risks are grim: drowning in sewage, falling from girders, gralloched by razor-wire, skewered on scaffolding. Longer-term dangers include respiratory problems from exposure to dusts and gases. I know, I know: why would you? Who would? It is a hugely strange scene, and – occasional claustrophiliac with an intermittent taste for decay that I am – I find myself rather gripped by it.</blockquote>
- List of car-free places - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
"Over the past 2 months the city government, in cooperation with business groups and non-profits, has turned a corner of one of the busiest intersections in San Francisco into a public plaza. The 17th Street Plaza project took 72-hours to implement, and is carefully called a “reversible trial.” Like the phrase “reversible pilot”.
- russell davies: draping the city in data and dodging augmented urban spam russelldavies.typepad.com
It's like the way advertising ended up all over the web - it seemed a pain-free option and a way to get things paid for. But if we want to provide people with all this information all over the city do we want to do it the same way?
The famously baffling metropolis is home to an experiment in ubiquitous computing that could transform the city
- Italo Calvino sparks obsessions | MetaFilter metafilter.com
"Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is so called because it asserts that what makes up a city is not so much its physical structure but the impression it imparts upon its visitors, the way its inhabitants move within, something unseen that hums between the